Deep in the Googleplex there is an engineering team thinking about how to extend Google’s reach into your TV. Its work goes way beyond the Google TV ads currently being tested by EchoStar (and targeted with help from Nielsen). It even goes way beyond the development of a Google set-top box, which has been hinted at in the past. In fact, Google may very well want to do to the set-top box what it is ...

Business Week has a long article expanding on the Google Social Nework Platform story we wrote about last month. Key facts from the article: Orkut is 1/4 the size of MySpace (Comscore shows a much closer race), but they’ve recently taken the lead in the Asia/Pacific region. Orkut is also very strong in Latin America, with double the traffic of MySpace and Facebook combined. Business Week also confirms our estimated November 5 launch date for ...

OK, you've downloaded the SDK and are now ready to build the next killer app for mobile (and maybe win some $$$ in the process ;) Activities? Intents? SimpleCursorAdapter? Huh? Hmm...how do I proceed? Well, that depends on your style. Some will want to carefully go through all the documentation top-to-bottom, while others may prefer to just dive right into code. Either path will eventually lead to the sample applications provided in the SDK — ...

Wow, what a week! The response from the community on Monday's Android SDK release has been overwhelming. Our forums have been flooded and we're glad to be helping people dig in writing new applications. A handful of quick notes for this Friday evening: We've released a quick point-revision of the SDK to fix some high-priority issues. You can now download M3-RC22a and read the release notes. Don't forget to get Eclipse to update the ADT ...

Companies can now go ahead and fire their expensive database administrators—those engineers who keep the Oracle or IBM databases humming. Amazon has just added an enterprise-class database called SimpleDB to its suite of cloud-based IT infrastructure, which also includes storage (S3) and computation (EC2) available by the drink. Today, Amazon is taking sign-ups for the SimpleDB beta, which should start in a few weeks. As it points out on the new Simple DB page: Amazon ...

Android's SDK offers an emulator that, among other things, lets you use the browser. Google used WebKit, an application framework that also powers Safari and Nokia's S60 browser.Android's browser does a good job at rendering complex web pages, but it doesn't have Flash support and it's really slow. You can zoom in, zoom out and move inside a web page. Here are some popular web sites rendered by an early version of Android's browser.Useragent.org:Gmail:Google Maps:NY ...

Posted by Elizabeth Yin, Developer ProgramsMany of you have expressed an interest in having the raw materials presented at Campfire One on November 1st. To that end, we've now posted the following: Higher quality video files of Campfire One, split up into 6 parts for ease of viewing and sharing (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ) The actual presentation displayed during the event The source code behind David Glazer's "10 minutes to an OpenSocial ...

An easy to use JavaScript text highlighting plugin for jQuery library.

Posted by: Elizabeth Yin, Developer ProgramsWe're excited to see that hi5, Ning, and Plaxo have OpenSocial sandboxes up and running live, which means that an application can now run on multiple websites. For example, previously, Songs iLike could run on the Orkut platform, but as of last week, it can run on hi5, Ning, Orkut, and Plaxo. To get the details on each of these containers, check these links out:Hi5: http://www.hi5net... http://opensocial... http://pulse.plax... http://code.googl... websites ...